In this more complete discussion of Compassionate Communication, something gets added to our reflection. We can look at how a question can actually work as a demand. To avoid such demands, it helps to examine or reflect on our response to any possible "No." When we respond to a "No" with any level of hurt, feeling of rejection, or even some degree of anger, we have not made a request. It was a demand. If saying "No" involves any cost at all for the speaker of that "No," we have made a demand. In the future, the person we have asked for something may well assume that any request we make actually signifies not a question but a demand. We can recover that situation only when we recognize within ourselves that we actually have made a demand. If we can do so, we can express our regrets, and ask if we can start again by making real requests, requests with no inherent forms of coercion or constraint.[134]
That's not so easy, recognizing that we have actually made a demand rather than request. When we ask, we may not recognize what we say as a demand until the person we ask says "No." Our vulnerability can feel exposed when we ask something from someone else. When the other person says "No," we can easily perceive that as rejection. In the dominator model, it's insubordination in most contexts. No matter how politely that "No" is expressed or no matter how sound the reasons given for the "No," even though, people have a right to say "No" without any reasons, our ego may spontaneously defend our identity from such a perceived rejection. . That defense may come as passive, simply feeling and showing hurt. It may show more aggressively: "Okay, be that way" or even, "I'll keep that in mind when you ask something." In any of these cases, we can see that when we ask our seeming question, perhaps without consciously knowing, we really don't want to take "No" for an answer.
That takes us back to the idea of choice. When we begin with our right to choice, which is a right we want to maintain for ourselves, we can easily project that right as inherent with everyone with whom we interact. When we ask a question, we create a situation in which the other person will make a choice based on any one of other criteria. If the other person gets to a "No," it really doesn't necessarily signify a rejection of us. It simply signifies that the person asked has made a choice for reasons known to that person. It isn't necessarily a "No" to us personally. It may only come as a "No" in the overall context. A "Yes" can always feel like a gift when we really ask. A "No" does not have to feel like a rejection if we really make a request and not a demand. When we "won't take No" for an answer when we ask a friend on a salt free diet to share salt laden food, we are making no gift but simply wanting to dominate the situation and make the other person conform to our way of thinking and living, to our meaning perspectives. No matter how unaware we are of what our implicit or explicit demands mean, they still violate the ends principle thereby work to make someone else a means to our end.